Assuming you mean “Can Mastodon instances defederate with Threads?”: Yes. Mastodon (and similar services) run on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows them to decide who they do and do not federate with. Many instances have chosen to preemptively block Threads, many have chosen not to. Pick what works for you.

by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse

Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you’re not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.

And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version… they already have the user advantage. There’s already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.

I am optimistic about Meta’s investment in the Fediverse. If you don’t believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t think you believe in it at all. You don’t want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you’re interested in. And really, it’s not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean… yeah, but that’s kind of the point?

Pre-0.19 I assume you would need to be on an instance that is blocking them.

Post-0.19 you can block them as an instance, meaning “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden”

So, the answer still varies depending on your goals for blocking.

For clarity:

• The 41% number combines both instances that have actually blocked Threads and those who have pledged to do so at some point, so “have blocked” is a bit misleading
• As stated, this is a percentage of instances, not users. Roughly 24% of users are on instances that have limited, blocked, or pledged to block Threads.

I don’t know if there’s a service that provides both functions. I’m sure there’s a way to do it - Lemmy posts are already accessible through Mastodon. Currently, I assume you would need the instance itself to offer both services under one account.

while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience

I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!

Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.

The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.

Some level of community merging seems both inevitable and necessary. Initially, my assumption was that a single instance would be the home for an individual community, but that’s just not how things work for many reasons. Communities of the same type should have a way to talk to each other, and more importantly, make it easy for users to follow them wherever they are. The current system is obviously inefficient for many reasons. I think there’s a lot of content across communities that is not being surfaced to users for whom that content is relevant, and it is making the entire system feel less lively than it could be.